Excerpt From Volume 4 of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Two chairs were left empty on the stage at this week’s official release of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The chairs were there to honour the memory of the children who never returned from the residential schools.

Below, a sobering excerpt from Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, volume 4 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report on Canada’s Residential Schools.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” is a systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate. The project’s research supports the following conclusions:

• The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students and the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students.

• For just under one-third of these deaths (32%), the government and the schools did not record the name of the student who died.

• For just under one-quarter of these deaths (23%), the government and the schools did not record the gender of the student who died.

• For just under one-half of these deaths (49%), the government and the schools did not record the cause of death.

• Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population.

• For most of the history of the schools, the practice was not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities.

• For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance.

• The federal government never established an adequate set of standards and regulations to guarantee the health and safety of residential school students.

• The federal government never adequately enforced the minimal standards and regulations that it did establish.

• The failure to establish and enforce adequate regulations was largely a function of the government’s determination to keep residential school costs to a minimum.

• The failure to establish and enforce adequate standards, coupled with the failure to adequately fund the schools, resulted in unnecessarily high death rates at residential schools.

Copies of the Truth and Reconciliation Final Report are available for purchase from our website:

• Vol. 1: Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939
• Vol. 1: Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 2, 1939 to 2000
• Vol. 2: Canada’s Residential Schools: The Inuit and Northern Experience
• Vol. 3: Canada’s Residential Schools: The Métis Experience
• Vol. 4: Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials
• Vol. 5: Canada’s Residential Schools: The Legacy
• Vol. 6: Canada’s Residential Schools: Reconciliation

L’édition française du “Rapport final de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada” est également disponible pour achat sur notre site internet :

• Vol. 1 : Pensionnats du Canada : L’histoire, partie 1, des origines à 1939
• Vol. 1 : Pensionnats du Canada : L’histoire, partie 2, de 1939 à 2000
• Vol. 2 : Pensionnats du Canada : L’expérience inuite et nordique
• Vol. 3 : Pensionnats du Canada : L’expérience métisse
• Vol. 4 : Pensionnats du Canada : Enfants disparus et lieux de sépulture non marqués
• Vol. 5 : Pensionnats du Canada : Les séquelles
• Vol. 6 : Pensionnats du Canada : La réconciliation